Top Stocks For 2011, Best Stock Investments For 2011, Hot Stocks For 2011

Gold stocks is known as perhaps the No. 1 "safe haven" in harsh economic times. Between mid-2007 and 2009, gold prices went from $940 an ounce to nearly $1,220 an ounce. That's more than a 33% gain at a time when equity prices, real estate prices and the value of the greenback were in a freefall.

That alone is reason enough to make investors want to add gold stocks to their portfolio... And they have.

In 2009, investors bought a total of 573 tonnes of gold through exchange-traded funds. That's 20.2 million ounces, and at the average price per ounce in 2009, that's an investment of $19.6 billion!

But with the strength of the dollar rising in the wake of the euro's near collapse, and the still-green shoots of recovery pushing up into the sun, individual investors might need more than one reason to keep or add gold stocks to their portfolios.

Indeed, here are five...

As you know from watching Viral Investing: Turning Market Chaos Into Cash, I have been predicting a sizable downturn in American top stocks for 2011. The depressants are manifold, not the least of which is the onset of the next leg of the "Great Recession" that began in 2007.

But more important than any singular piece of information is the way in which investors understand and act on available data. And the rate and fashion of memetic uptake is cyclic and predictable.

WaveStrength attempts to combine both sides of the equation. It establishes large groups of investors' predisposing cyclic framework, and then tracks the pool of existing information as it enters that framework.

Right now, the central bundle of memes that I have been tracking could be labeled as "Investors' Lost Faith." The core idea is that most every investor out there has known for months that this last bullish cycle would end in the same fashion as the previous two.

However, anticipation of a third massive crash has accelerated the rate at which we would arrive at the next crisis. Indeed, I believe that we are already past that critical point.